After Shannon Morgan returned from serving in Iraq, the memories of killing and carnage continued to haunt her, memories that some told her were unexpected for a female soldier.

Department of Defense policy bars female soldiers from direct ground combat, but for Ms. Morgan, like the four other female soldiers profiled in the documentary “Lioness,” that regulation meant little in the heat of battle. Attached to all-male combat units in the Army and the Marines as part of the Lioness program, the female troops were used to search Muslim women as needed and to defuse the cultural tensions caused by strange men interacting with Iraqi women. But when fighting broke out, the female soldiers fought back.

“We’d been downtown searching houses, and fighting would break out,” Staff Sgt. Ranie Ruthig, a former mechanic with a Lioness team, said in a recent interview. “We’ve had grenades thrown at us, shooting at us with AK-47’s. It’s a fight-or-flight thing. When someone is shooting at you, you don’t say, ‘Stop the war, I’m a girl.’ ”

As Ms. Morgan says toward the end of “Lioness,” which has its broadcast premiere on Wednesday night at 9:30 on Channel 13 in New York, “This is a new thing for people to realize that their daughters are over doing the exact same thing that males are doing now.”

The documentary makes the point that the nature of the Iraq war — fuzzy front lines and guerrilla tactics — has thrust more female soldiers (who represent 14 percent of active-duty enlisted personnel) into enemy fire than ever before. And, like the men, the women sometimes find the return to civilian life difficult, suffering the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and the depression and sleeplessness that come with it.

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Shannon Morgan, a former Lioness, with her parents.Credit
Stephen T. Maing/ITVS

The New York filmmakers Meg McLagan (a cultural anthropologist whose work includes “Tibet in Exile”) and Daria Sommers (“Eastern Spirit, Western World” and “Duncan’s Shadow”) said they expected that their film “Lioness” would reinvigorate a debate about the role of women in combat and how best to serve the needs of veterans.

Their 82-minute film, part of the “Independent Lens” series, is scheduled to be shown nationally on public television stations on Nov. 13. It has been screened at the Full Frame, Tribeca and Human Rights Watch film festivals and at numerous conferences and other gatherings for female veterans, social workers, military personnel and others.

“This is not an antiwar film,” Ms. McLagan said. “It takes a position that we need to talk about and recognize what women are doing. The gap between the policy and the reality needs to be closed.”

But Eileen M. Lainez, a Pentagon spokeswoman, disputed the premise of a gap. “A recent RAND report confirms that the Army and all other services remain in compliance with the DOD policy regarding the assignment of women in the military,” she wrote in an e-mail message.

A 1994 Department of Defense policy prohibits assigning women to any unit below brigade level when the unit’s primary mission is direct combat on the ground, Ms. Lainez said in her e-mail message.

“Women will continue to be assigned to units and positions that may necessitate combat actions within the scope of their restricted positioning — situations for which they are fully trained and equipped to respond,” she added.

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Staff Sgt. Ranie Ruthig, left, and Sgt. Patricia Moreno were part of the Lioness team in Ramadi, Iraq, when the documentary about that group was filmed.Credit
Lloyd Francis/Army Times, via ITVS

Ms. Sommers argues that the Lioness teams are in a “gray zone” when it comes to combat. The filmmakers sent “Lioness” to the public affairs office at the Army for fact-checking and as a courtesy, Ms. Sommers said, and “they said O.K.”

The profile subjects were in an engineering battalion (which included about 20 women) deployed to Iraq from Fort Riley in Kansas to be support troops. They were in the first Lioness group, created by their battalion commander, and they volunteered to accompany all-male Army (and later Marine) combat units in Ramadi, in central Iraq, in 2003-4.

“A lot of this is a cultural story,” Ms. Sommers said. “The culture has a lot of ambivalence about what women should be doing in a war.”

When filming began, the documentary focused on five women: Specialist Morgan and Sergeant Ruthig, both mechanics; Specialist Rebecca Nava, a supply clerk from Jamaica, Queens; Maj. Kate Pendry Guttormsen, a West Point graduate whose hometown is Toledo, Ohio; and Capt. Anastasia Breslow, a communications specialist from Fort Bragg, the Army post in North Carolina, according to biographical information supplied by the filmmakers.

The women have all stayed in touch. They are seen in the film taking care of their children, trying to return to civilian life, discussing their feelings about war. Captain Breslow is seen reading accounts of the war from her diary. Except for Ms. Nava and Ms. Morgan, the women have remained in the service, Ms. McLagan said.

As for Ms. Morgan, who joined the Army to pay for college, she is now 27 and studying nursing, caring for her aging parents in Pocola, Okla., and doing well these days. She said she agreed to talk about her bouts of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression for “Lioness” in the hopes of helping other women. Despite her struggles, Ms. Morgan said she “absolutely” still supported allowing women to take combat roles.

“There are women who are prepared,” she said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Battleground: Female Soldiers in the Line of Fire. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe